Huffman compression is a statistical, lossless, data compression algorithm that compresses data by assigning variable length codes to symbols, with the more frequently appearing symbols given shorter codes than the less. This work is a modification of the Huffman algorithm which permits uncompressed data to be decomposed into indepen- dently compressible and decompressible blocks, allowing for concurrent compression and decompression on multiple processors. We create implementations of this modified algorithm on a current NVIDIA GPU using the CUDA API as well as on a current Intel chip and the performance results are compared, showing favorable GPU performance for nearly all tests. Lastly, we discuss the necessity for high performance data compression in today's supercomputing ecosystem.
@article{arxiv.1107.1525,
title = {Accelerating Lossless Data Compression with GPUs},
author = {R. L. Cloud and M. L. Curry and H. L. Ward and A. Skjellum and P. Bangalore},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.1525},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
peer reviewed and published in undergraduate research journal Inquiro in 2009 after Summer work in 2009